Legend Kelly Slater —still closely connected to SA – crests new waves as activist and businessperson

Kelly Slater with the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2025 Laureus World Sport Awards held at Palacio De Cibeles in Madrid, Spain, on 21 April.(Photo by Alberto Gardin/Eurasia Sport Images/Getty Images)

By Craig Ray

28 Apr 2025

Slater was recognised with a Laureus Lifetime Achievement Award, but his busy life these days has a decidedly environmental focus.

Professional surfing might be a niche sport compared with soccer, tennis or cricket, but the name Kelly Slater transcends barriers. Slater is the most decorated pro surfer of all time, with 11 world titles and 56 event wins accumulated over four decades of competitive surfing.

His name has become synonymous with longevity and excellence in the athletic arena. A global sporting force, he is a powerful advocate for environmental causes and living a clean and healthy lifestyle.

Slater (53) was recognised with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2025 Laureus World Sports Awards, which were held in Madrid, Spain, on 21 April. Another recipient of a special honour – the Global Icon Award – was tennis great Rafael Nadal. Among his athletic peers at least, Slater is viewed with the same respect as Nadal.

“I’ve lived a clean lifestyle, a drug‑free lifestyle, and I’ve always been a proponent of being healthy and clean to young kids,” Slater said of his longevity and appeal. “Aside from … winning the 11 world titles, I’m proud that I believed I could do it and stuck to my guns.”

Local connections

Slater, who hails from Florida in the US, has strong connections to South Africa through his sport. He came to Durban in the 1990s to compete in the now-defunct Gunston 500 and has been a regular visitor to Jeffreys Bay as a competitor in the World Surf League.

The right-hand point break at J-Bay, as it is fondly known, is one of the legendary stops on the league’s cosmopolitan calendar, and Slater has excelled here with four wins.

Read more: The king crests — Kelly Slater, surfing’s GOAT, bails

The surfer still competes sporadically through sponsors’ invites, and one of those invites is to the Eastern Cape this July for the Corona Cero Open J-Bay, the 10th stop of the 2025 Championship Tour.

“I’ll probably take a few more [sponsor invites],” Slater told Daily Maverick in Madrid. “I’m going to surf Trestles [in California] in June. Outerknown [his clothing brand] is sponsoring it and Dylan [Slater, no relation], our CEO, asked me to surf it, so I will. I heard a rumour I might get offered J-Bay, but we’ll see. I sort of got informally offered it a couple of months ago, but I don’t think I’ll take it.

“That month is my son’s first birthday, so I’ll probably just want to be doing whatever we think he’ll want to be doing.

“But we do want to bring him to South Africa. We want to teach him how to collect all the shells that we like so we don’t have to do it any more. South African beaches have great shells.

“I’m 100% retired from full-time competition. But if I get offered wild cards at spots I like, it’s fun for me. It’s not serious. I’m not chasing points or money these days.”

Slater is also closely connected to South Africa through charitable work and a simple love for the country and its surf.

“I surfed the Gunston probably six or eight times. I don’t remember the last year I surfed it. I surfed it all through the ’90s until, I’d say, at least 2000. Durban’s changed a lot, unfortunately,” Slater said.

“The last time I was there, I felt sad because I felt like there was this community and this area that I grew really fond of from ’92 on and made lots of good friends.

“Some of my best friends I ever had were from South Africa, particularly in Durban. I just really looked forward to going there every year. Now it just doesn’t have the surf culture that it had.

“It feels like it’s got no energy when you’re down there. Everyone’s kind of moved off to Ballito. You don’t hear much about Cave Rock any more and the Bluff... There’re still great waves over there, but there’s just some lack of... I don’t know what it is.

“I work with the charity Surfers Not Street Children. Tom Hewitt, an English guy who runs it, is doing some great stuff there. He’s taken these kids literally off the street, whose parents might be drug dealers or prostitutes or in jail, and they really don’t have a future ahead of them, and he’s dedicated his life to them.

“He’s helping kids get out of poverty, to get an education while teaching them to surf and figuring out how to find a way to get a job. So, there are some positives, but overall, surf-wise, it’s really gone down the tubes in that area.”

Kelly Slater with the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2025 Laureus World Sport Awards held at Palacio De Cibeles in Madrid, Spain, on 21 April.(Photo: Alberto Gardin/Eurasia Sport Images/Getty Images)

Environmental concerns

Slater could easily shuffle off into the shadows and live a contented lifestyle, but he is an activist and a businessperson. He has numerous businesses, from designing and installing wave pools to producing sunscreen lotions made from sustainable ingredients.

He is also active in the fight against plastic in the oceans, which is his greatest environmental concern. “Plastic pollution is a fucking nightmare,” Slater said animatedly. “It’s at the deepest points of the ocean now. They’re finding garbage on the sea floor.

“And microplastics are a problem too. It’s really going to affect our food sources and stuff more and more and more. By 2040 or 2050, there’s going to be more massive waste in the ocean than there will be sea life.

“Generally, I think there’s a lot of fearmongering in the media around environmental things, climate change and so on. With plastic pollution, I don’t have any doubt it’s probably worse than we talk about. And it’s so tied into our everyday lives with all the waste that we all create.

“Fortunately, the younger generations have been exposed to the planet’s environmental issues early on and they have inventive ideas to solve problems. If you pair creativity and technology with emerging generations, I think they will most likely come up with some really cool solutions in the near future.

“But we’re going to have to figure out how to take this plastic out of the ocean and maybe start to alleviate how we use plastics. It’s a byproduct of the oil industry, and that’s not going away anytime soon.

“People need to start incorporating environmental awareness. I started Outerknown 11 years ago. Social compliance was a big thing for me. It was sort of the biggest thing in environmental sustainability. So we handpick the factories we work at. We make sure there’s no slave labour. We make sure that everyone has a working living wage.

“Workers are not held against their will and they get paid well. Unfortunately for the customer, our prices reflect that. When they’re expecting a $20–$40 pair of board shorts, it might be $80 to $100. But textiles cost more. The workforce costs more.

“We’re putting something positive in and we hope those products last longer. So, you can buy one or two instead of five. We found our customer and our groove.” DM

This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R35.

Categories:

Tags:

DM is much better if you are signed in...

Sport

Local connections

Environmental concerns